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Mathematics

Line ’em Up is a free app designed to support young student’s mastery of number order. Students are instructed to put number blocks in the correct order on a given number line. A wide variety of options allow the app to be customized to between 10-20 tiles displayed, whether tiles are given one at a time or spread out in a pile, and which group of numbers to practice between 1-100. There is no voice narration on this app, so it is advised that initially,teachers or parents customize the settings before giving the iPad to the student. With practice however, students may be able to extend their skills and choose their own settings in the options menu or follow verbal instructions from an adult.

Depending on the settings, Line ’em Up is suitable for Early Childhood and Lower Primary.

Also called Chicken Bounce, Tiny Chicken Learns Math is a free app which helps users practice their addition, subtraction, multiplication and division skills through a game interface. Tiny Chicken must cross the river and users must correctly answer the maths problem by moving the raft to the correct answer on the number line. If they answer correctly, Tiny Chicken bounces off the raft to the other side of the river. Users will need to click through an advertisement when they first open the app. Each skills category has six timed levels and users have the option of playing with and without the background music and sounds.

Todo K-2 Math Practice is a free app which includes 8 multi-level activities designed to support and increase math fluency in Lower Primary. The play based activities include skill practice in counting, writing numerals, addition and subtraction, sequencing, and early equation building. Each activity includes individual levels of practice (organized by grade level), but not all activities are available for every grade. The app includes free choice and timed practice modules. Voiceover narration and how-to videos at the beginning of each practice activity optimize the app for students who are still learning to read.

Number Pieces Basic is a free app that helps students develop mathematics skills like place value and computation through an open ended platform of base ten number blocks that come in groups of 1, 10 and 100. Students can group, break apart, regroup, choose one of three colours, and rotate the pieces as well as annotate using the in-app pencil and eraser tools. Number Pieces Basic is ideal for counting, grouping, demonstrating the concepts of place value, addition and subtraction. A more advanced version, the paid app Number Pieces, has additional tools for representation, multiplication, and division.

Number Pieces Basic is suitable for Lower Primary, Upper Primary and occasional uses in Secondary.

JumbleBook is a free app that lets users create and scramble animal parts: heads, middles, and tails into fun and funky new animal combinations. Each new animal combination makes its own unique sound when tapped. The app offers scenes and a challenge mode as options to the standard animal mix and match. In-app purchases unlock other themes including aliens, dinosaurs and characters. Users can save their creations to a gallery, add them to the ipad photo stream or email them.

MyScript Calculator is a free app that offers a unique spin on the traditional punch-enter style calculator. Instead of tapping numbers and symbols into this calculator, a user writes them using his/her own finger. The calculator is a simple ‘graph paper’ background with no buttons or clutter, so it’s imperative that users have some comprehension of the numbers, symbols, and calculations they would like to use and do. Some minor potential hangups are the lack of a zoom/reduce screen feature for longer calculations and the potential for the app to misread a user’s handwriting. Simple adjustments like left hand input and decimal place value are available in the settings sub-menu at the top left corner of the screen. There is also a simple video tutorial included for new users. Finally, this app is for relatively simple maths calculations only. It does not accept algebra or calculus inputs and is best associated with a simple calculator rather than a tell-all of mathematical mysteries.

MoMA Art Lab is a free app produced by the Museum of Modern Art that challenges users to creatively use shapes and colors in imaginative ways to produce art or practice fundamentals like line, shape, form, colour, space, repetition, and symmetry. The Art Lab app has three main modes. The default mode is a free form rectangular space where students can use a variety of shapes and a pencil tool with varying widths, both available in 36 colours, to explore and create. The two other modes are accessible by the green and orange circles at the top left corner of the art space. The green circle with a lightbulb icon gives a series of creative prompts to get ideas flowing and is an excellent way to familiarize students with artistic and technical capabilities of the app, for instance using shapes to create familiar objects and exploring the drawing, pinching, and rotating finger skills that are the basic elements of interacting within the app environment. The orange circle with the scissors and pencil icons features nine activities that familiarize Art Lab users with some of the MoMA’s most famous artworks, artists, and their techniques. Other helpful in-app features like voice-over narration, camera and gallery increase this app’s usefulness and general applicability in an educational setting.